In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.
I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).
This student submission again comes from my former student Kim Hong. Her topic, from Pre-Algebra: fractions, percents, and decimals.
How could you as a teacher create an activity or project that involves your topic?
I think making the students create a foldable, a short and quick project, would be a good and concrete activity for teaching fractions, decimals, and percents. Each flap is a topic. There is a definition and example. On the back of the foldable the students could create a table going between fractions, decimals and percents with many “harder” values.
The foldable is portable and quick, and can be a helpful and quick resource.
The students can also draw pictures inside the flaps. E.g A pizza and its slices to show fractions.
http://smithcurriculumconsulting.com/m4m_foldable/
How can this topic be used in your students’ future courses in mathematics or science?
This topic can be used in a students’ future course when they come across proportions and rates. They could see proportions when it appears in physics such a changes in time and speed. They could see rates of change when it appears in calculus involving derivatives. These values are factions that can be changed to decimals and percents because everything is a part of a whole.
Also, fractions, which are numbers over a whole, are the same as the term rational quantities. Rational quantities are numbers that can be written as a ratio that is a fraction. There is a subset of the Reals that are called the Rationals. In advanced logic and math courses, students will be able to work with this subset of the Reals.
How can technology (YouTube, Khan Academy [khanacademy.org], Vi Hart, Geometers Sketchpad, graphing calculators, etc.) be used to effectively engage students with this topic? Note: It’s not enough to say “such-and-such is a great website”; you need to explain in some detail why it’s a great website.
I found this really awesome website the students could play around with for the first minutes of class to get their juices flowing. Basically the objective of the game is to group the equal values in circles. There is a check answer option as well.
It starts off very simple with very easy mental math and then with each level, the difficulty increases.
http://www.mathplayground.com/Decention/Decention.html
Mean Green Math 